Chapter 13: Easter eggs
Debugging RSD. We are back to character creation and party formation. Moose determined that the presence of characters in the 'party buffer' in RAM doesn't necessarily mean they are actually in the party. In order to be in the party, bit 0x37 needs to be 1.
In a fascinating aside, we discovered suspicious names in RAM that holds characters that are pre-created for new users. "Nayr" and "Ytnom" (Ryan and Monty backward) are possibly/likely the names of people that worked on the game and used as initialization values for variables. "Werdna" and "Trebor" (Andrew and Robert) are already well-known backward names that appear in the game - they are creators of the game. I wonder if there are more easter eggs in the RAM.
Could you scan wiz1.dsk in this area of RAM to see if there are other easter egg names?
I scanned the disk image itself, and in the same character-record-shaped region I found three groups of four 208-byte records. The names are:
THESUS
TEMPEST
LYSANDER
TREON
FLAMUS
NOBAL
SUIL SIBMOBAD
NEB
YTNOM
NAYR
CRAZY YRRAB
ELMER
Luis Bombadis, Ben, Monty, Ryan, Crazy Barry, and Elmer are characters that appear in the RAM as lost. Internet research indicates that these were probably real characters created by users - not developer easter eggs - and that found their way to me through piracy of the disks. I don't even remember where I got my Wizardry disk images from, so this is a very plausible idea!
Getting late, gotta hit the sack. The party did have a couple of successful runs navigation-wise. But because of combat bugs everyone died. I've started Campaign-015 and will resume it tomorrow.